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Zeitgeist, far-right conspiracy theories and Occupy Wall Street

October 27, 2011 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- The global Occupy movement sparked by Occupy Wall Street has mobilised tens of thousands of people angered at the actions of the big corporations, banks and financial institutions. Protesters rightly hit out at government bailouts of the banks and the close relationships between politicians and big business, while leaving the majority -- the "99%" -- to pay the price through austerity and attacks on their rights.

Despite the movement's overwhelmingly anti-capitalist thrust, on its margins are a number of organisations peddling conspiracy theories and right-wing ideas. In the United States, these include supporters of the right-wing libertarian Ron Paul, the far-right cult led by Lyndon LaRouche and even, according to some reprts, the US Nazi Party. In Australia, supporters of the far-right Citizens Electoral Council have also been circulating their material.

In both countries, people influenced by Zeitgeist films and its theories are also present. While apparently more benign than the groups mentioned above, the ideas about a conspiracy of a small cabal of "international bankers" popularised by Zeitgeist share much in common with the far right, as the following 2010 article from Scottish Socialist Youth explains.

[Another extensive expose of the Zeitgeist films and their far-right basis is available from Third Estate.]

* * *

By Jack Ferguson

June 23, 2010 -- Scottish Socialist Youth -- If you’re the kind of person who knows there’s a lot of problems in
our society, and you’re looking for solutions for what to do about it,
there’s a good chance you’ve found yourself here on our blog.

There’s also a good chance you might have come across something
called the Zeitgeist Movement. If you have, and you’re attracted to the
ideas it puts forward, this article is our attempt to argue that
Zeitgeist offers no real solutions to the economic and ecological crises
that human civilisation is facing. In fact, quite the opposite: instead
of explaining to people how we can change our society for the better,
many of the ideas put forward in the Zeitgeist films have their origins
in far-right and racist groups, and they’re ideas which are both
crazy and useless.

The reason we’re doing this is because we know that Zeitgeist has
been really influential on thousands of people who’ve seen it online,
and because we think that is potentially really damaging to the attempts
(which we’re part of) to build a mass movement capable of bringing
fundamental change to the world. Zeitgeist deliberately tries to pitch itself
as an appeal to people who have a basically left-wing outlook, but the
ideas it puts forward about our world as it is just now are not left
wing at all.

Zeitgeist got started when a man called Peter Joseph (this apparently
isn’t his real or full name, as he conceals his real identity) released
a documentary called, amazingly enough, Zeitgeist (which is German for
"spirit of the times") in 2007. This film was stuck up on Google video,
and quickly got loads of views. This was then followed by a sequel,
Zeitgeist Addendum, the following year.

The first film is an amalgamation of conspiracy theories: first of
all about religion, making all kinds of claims about the origins of
Christianity; then a large middle section about 9/11, asserting that
there were no terror attacks and they were in fact carried out by the US
government. The final section is probably the most important for us to
examine as socialists, because it’s about money and finance. It argues
that the world is dominated by a small elite who operate through control
of international finance, the media and education. This elite
deliberately enslaves the rest of the world by keeping us permanently in
debt to the banks by the way they operate the money system.

The second film then goes on to build on these economic themes, and
argues for an alternative: eliminating the profit system and creating
what they call a "Resource Based Economy", in which everyone in the world
has access to what they need to survive for free by use of advanced
technology. In many ways this society they describe is what socialism or
communism would really be like in the future. The problem is that
Zeitgeist specifically describes itself as a non-political movement, and
offers no real plans for how to create the society. However, in the
absence of actually describing itself as left wing or right wing,
Zeitgeist has taken on a lot of ideas from some very dodgy sources.

Racism, anti-Semitism and the modern world

To understand where some of the ideas in Zeitgeist come from, we need to have a look first at their history.

From the 15-16th centuries onwards, the world began to be rapidly
transformed by the technological and social advances that allowed
European peoples to expand around the world and create colonies and
empires. Explorers from European powers like Spain, Portugal, the
Netherlands and England began to move into Africa, the Americas and
Asia. Through the slave trade and the exploitation of mines and
plantations in these new colonies, European traders became rich.

Following this, the newly enriched classes began to use their money
to kickstart the industrial revolution in Europe. They also grew tired
of the fact that in European societies power was still held by people
who were born into the aristocracy, when they were rich and felt they
should also be powerful. This led to revolutions in France and the US,
and the beginning of the modern world. Over the course of the 18th-19th
centuries, the pace of change increased rapidly, with huge numbers of
people leaving the land and farm work to move to massive new cities and
work in the factories. Traditional sources of authority and power were
undermined, and many people were left confused and angered by a world
that they didn’t recognise any more.

The 19th century saw the development of a mass socialist movement, as
working-class people began to realise that if economic and political
power was taken out of the hands of the capitalists then society could
be run for the benefit of all.

But other groups, particularly middle-class people who had no
attraction to the ideas of socialism, began to seek other explanations
for why the world had changed and what to do about it. Many of these
people felt that they didn’t have a place in modern society, but they
also didn’t want to go back to medieval times. Unable to see the reality
that the world had been changed by huge economic and social forces
beyond the control of any individual, they came to blame what was wrong
in society on some kind of small secret elite who were controlling
things for their own benefit.

Racism

People talked about secret societies like the Illuminati or the
Freemasons dominating politics and government from behind the scenes.
Crucially, these ideas were tied into the idea, which was hugely
powerful in the late 19th and early 20th century, that the world was
fundamentally divided along racial lines. Many of these people believed
there was a plot to undermine the power and dominance of “the white
race”.

Racism is a set of ideas that takes older prejudices, and
systematically makes them into a worldview. Contrary to what most folk
think, it emerged specifically in the modern world, as a way of
explaining and understanding what was happening as global society began
to rapidly change. Most racialised views of different peoples made their
victims out to be inferior, such as the claim black people are stupid
and lazy for example.

But Jews had a long history in Christian thought as being thought of
as demonic enemies. They were blamed for the killing of Jesus, and in
the medieval world were regarded as clever and dangerous because they
took part in trade and money lending. In the modern world Jews came to
be understood by many people as some kind of absolutely monstrous "Other",
a huge evil threat. This was of course total nonsense, but it was a
useful idea for those who couldn’t face the reality of what was going on
in capitalist society, and for those in power who didn’t want people to
see that reality.

Anti-Semitic ideas became to be encapsulated in the idea that there
was a world Jewish conspiracy, which aimed to establish a global
government under their control. They would do this by their
international control of banks and money, as well as control of the
media and education.

These ideas came together in a book called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This was an anti-Semitic forgery put together in Russia at the turn of
the 20th century, which claimed to be documents of meetings and plans of
the Jewish elite to dominate the world. These documents were circulated
around the world, and became particularly important after the Russian
Revolution in 1917. Many, who were fooled into thinking the Protocols
were real, used them as evidence that the revolution was part of the
Jewish conspiracy, and that the Bolsheviks aimed to advance it. This was
a huge part of why Hitler hated socialists and communists so much. But
the same ideas also had massive circulation in the leading government
and powerful circles of US politics, and were argued by many right wing
US congressmen and other political figures.

If it has ever confused you why right-wing conspiracy nutters say
they hate banks and big business, and then go on to say they hate
communists and socialists who run the world, this is why. For them,
communism and socialism are part of a wider conspiracy by a tiny elite
to control the world. The aim of this group, they think, is to create a
one world government. Whether they talk about Jews openly, or whether
they restrict what they’re saying to names like “international bankers”,
the origins of this idea go back to the Protocols and the mad ideas of
19th century anti-Semites.

The Protocols are a straight-up work of fiction. But the ideas they
put forward have surfaced again and again. Since World War II it’s been
increasingly difficult for racist groups to openly advocate
anti-Semitism, because these ideas saw their ultimate expression in the
slaughter of the Holocaust. Even before this, many didn’t talk openly
about Jews, but instead about “international bankers”, the “secret
cabal” who ran the world.

The problem with all this for socialists is obvious: financial
capitalists really do hold a huge amount of power and influence over
government policies, and the international ruling class does coordinate
its actions secretly and conspiratorially to make sure that capitalism
keeps working and that profits are maximised.

However, these things aren’t the result of a plot of a small group of
evil men. The fact is that capitalism is a self-sustaining economic
system with a life of its own. It doesn’t really matter who is at the
top as long as somebody is. People find it hard to grasp the reality of
the way our economic and social system works, because it’s complex and
hard to understand. Put simply, capitalists don’t want to just get rich
and sit back. They want to find ways they can invest profits to create
more profits and keep the economy growing. That’s the driving force, not
the evil desires of a small group of men. But it’s hard to get your
head round that, and many people find it much easier to blame an
identifiable group they can easily conceptualise, like Jews.

The 19th century German socialist August Bebel once said that
“anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools” because it tried to
understand the causes of real problems resulting from capitalism, and
instead blamed them on Jews. Throughout the 20th century, many right
wingers began to see the dominance of banks and financial capital as
evidence of a Jewish conspiracy. For them, this was evidence of the
traditional prejudice that Jews were evil, manipulative money lenders
bent on power and control.

The real reason that finance has become more and more dominant is
that it’s increasingly difficult for capitalists to invest their money
in something that produces stuff (like a factory) and make their money
back, because after 200-odd years of capitalism the world is full of
factories and stuff -- so it’s harder and harder to make new products,
like cars or furniture or tools say, and make a profit from it. So
instead capitalists put more of their money into banks, financial
investments etc. There’s no secret to it -- it’s just about making
money, and what’s the best way to go about it.

If I find someone who’s in the KKK who has a great perspective on
global finance, I’m not going to dismiss them just because they’re a
racist and a bigot, I’m going to read what it is. I don’t dismiss
anybody because of their beliefs because I understand that beliefs are a
product of cultural conditioning.

I find this particular quote very revealing, because it’s absolutely
clear that many of the conspiracy ideas put forward in the first film do
ultimately derive from the far right and anti-Semitism. Contrary to
what Peter thinks, it’s very hard to take these ideas in isolation from
the overarching worldview they’re actually part of.

Zeitgeist argues that banks create fictional money in order to keep
us all in debt and to allow them to manipulate the economy for their own
secretive control. This is at heart a restatement of the idea that
there is a group of manipulative money lenders running the world. While
Zeitgeist calls this group “international bankers”, the original
understanding was, of course, that these people were the Jews.

I’m sure that defenders of the film would argue that they are not
anti-Semites, and that the film at no point names “the Jews” as
responsible for the issues they raise, which is true. However, this
defence falls down when you look at some of the people the film quotes
prominently and approvingly. Several figures from the early 20th century
are quoted for what they have to say about “international bankers".
These people were out and out racists, and we should have no doubt about
who they mean when they talk about “international bankers”.

A good example of this is Louis McFadden, a racist US congressman
from 1915-23. He’s quoted at length in Zeitgeist, with his claims that
“A world banking system was being set up here … a superstate controlled
by international bankers acting together to enslave the world for their
own pleasure…” A quote of his they don’t use “in the United States
today, the Gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the
lawful money”. He was absolutely a product of his time, the height of
scientifically and politically accepted racism, and his economic views
can’t be separated from his views about Jews.

What Zeitgeist doesn’t tell you is that money is just a
representation of the value created by the people that do the work in an
economy. Wealth comes originally from human labour. At your work, the
work you do for a part of your day makes the boss enough money to pay
your wages, and the rest becomes profits. But capitalism wants to use
this money to invest and make more money. The state and its economic
policy isn’t a conspiracy to make a few people richer, but instead it
tries to create the conditions to allow more profit to be extracted and
invested. This is a part of the system we live under, and isn’t to do
with a few evil individuals running things for their own benefit. In a
system like ours, there will always be people at the top administering
things. The point is that the system needs to be changed.

Traditional anti-Semitic accusations are given new life, this time
again blamed on “international bankers” in other parts of the film as
well. A prominent claim in the Protocols is that Jews deliberately start
wars for their own profit. In the film, it’s argued that throughout the
20th century the US has used faked incidents, or deliberate
provocations to generate excuses to enter wars, the latest being, it
claims, 9/11. Now of course, there is a grain of truth in this. Some of
the incidents the film talks about, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident,
which was used as a pretext for the US to enter fully into the Vietnam War, was faked. But the film then goes on to claim that the US
never intended to win the war in Vietnam, its sole interest being in
the continuation of the war for profit. While wars do of course generate
a lot of profit for manufacturers of weapons and war materials, the
idea that the huge effort the US put into to trying to keep its own
puppets in power in Vietnam was never intended to win is a joke.

'One world government'

However, these views of war fit in with what Peter Joseph thinks the
ultimate aim of the elite is: a one world government. This is a time-honoured phantom fear of the conspiracy far right, that in fact all
governments in the world are being controlled by a shadowy elite behind
the scenes. The film argues that the Cold War was a distraction, and
that the “international bankers” controlled both sides (reinventing the
old myth that the Russian Revolution was just part of a Jewish plot for
global domination). But in a world where China and Russia have made huge
steps to build their own geopolitical power throughout Asia, and where
countries like Brazil, Turkey, Iran and Venezuela are all actively
engaged in trying to build their own international power at the expense
of the US, the idea that we are headed for a global government any time
soon is laughable. It is a crazy fantasy that can only be believed if
you accept false evidence.

The film also talks about control of education and the media to keep
people stupid and easily manipulated. Again, there’s clearly a grain of
truth in this, but when coupled with a conspiracy worldview it becomes a
re-telling of one of the most powerful anti-Semitic myths: that the
Jews control the media, and fill our heads with propaganda.

The point here is that Zeitgeist deals with issues that have some
substance to them. If you follow many leading conspiracy theorists,
people like Alex Jones for example, it’s often the case that they
identify things that have some reality to them. But because they can’t
get their heads round the difficult concepts of what’s really going on
in a complex, unpredictable global social and economic system, they look
for individuals or groups to blame. They try to give the people
responsible a face.

Peter Joseph, in making the first Zeitgeist film, has clearly used as
much of his source material these kinds of people, and fails to
identify the real reasons for the problems that the human race faces.
But what’s worrying about this is that it’s packaged in a way to make it
look left wing, to appeal to people who are looking for genuine
solutions to capitalism and its problems. Instead of finding them, those
attracted to Zeitgeist are actually being sold ideas that originate in
racism and all the lies and myths of anti-Semitism.

Fascism

The risks of this are there for all to see if you look back at the history of fascism. Mussolini and Oswald Mosley, who founded the British Union of Fascists,
both started out involved with the left. However, they were later to
move away from this and become fascists. Without clear understanding of
what capitalism is and what it does, it’s easy to fall back on simpler
ideas that blame the wrong people. A case in point is US conspiracy
theorist and far rightist Lyndon LaRouche, who also is quoted
approvingly in Zeitgeist.

LaRouche is a prolific writer and several times candidate for president of the US. He’s also the leader of a violent cult which has
been implicated in several deaths of people who got involved with it.
Like fascists before him, LaRouche started out involved with the left,
but became more and more right wing as the years went by, and now
peddles anti-Semitic lies, as well as approvingly quoting Saddam Hussein
in his publications. One case of how dangerous his movement can be is
the mysterious death of Jeremiah Duggan
who got involved, but at a conference revealed himself to be
Jewish. After a panicked phone call to his mum, he was found dead the
next morning. The LaRouchites claim he committed suicide.

Now to be clear, I’m not claiming that the Zeitgeist movement has
killed people, or that Peter Joseph is a Hitler in waiting. What I’m
saying is that if you’re looking to do something about changing society,
starting off with folk who think quoting fascists, racists and
anti-Semites as part of their case isn’t the way to go.

Zeitgeist 2: Star Trek solutions

If you try and engage Zeitgeist activists about these issues, in all
likelihood they will say something along the lines of “Well, we don’t
promote the first film anymore, we’ve moved on to new things”. Sometime
between the making of the first and second films, Peter Joseph came
into contact with Jacques Fresco, a designer and engineer who has a
series of plans for improving society that he calls the Venus Project.
Zeitgeist now describes itself as “the activist wing of the Venus
Project”. Privately, some are trying to distance themselves from some of
the material in the first film, but officially it is still promoted on
the main page when you google Zeitgeist, and remains most people’s
introduction to the movement.

The Venus Project advocates what it calls a “resource-based economy”,
arguing that there are enough resources in the world to provide
everyone with a decent standard of living. The problem they argue is
that capitalism deliberately makes resources scarce in order to make a
profit. So far this is definitely something socialists could agree with.
The project goes on to present a whole series of exciting looking sci-fi style drawings of what the high-tech future they propose will look
like, which are strangely retro and remind you of concept art for 60s
sci-fi shows.

I absolutely support the idea of a society with no money where all
your basic needs are met for free. That’s the future I’m fighting for.
But the way that we go about this in Scottish Socialist Youth (SSY) and the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) is to try and build
change in the here and now, trying to win people to socialist ideas by
making concrete changes to peoples lives now. If I were to go out on the
street today and start handing out leaflets that said, “We want to
abolish money and make everything free”, then most people would dismiss
us as crazy.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to just wish a new society
into existence; it has to be built patiently by the collective
cooperation and work of masses of people.

The Zeitgeist movement don’t seem to agree. It argues that all our
problems can be solved by scientists, and explicitly say it rejects
politics or political movements. In effect what the Zeitgeist movement argues for is a
technocracy, at least at first. That means that what happens in society
will be determined by a scientific elite. Jacques Fresco argues that
politicians now are incapable of implementing solutions because they
don’t have the right expertise and only say what they think will get
them elected. But the solution to this isn’t a society run by “experts”,
but the implementation of mass democracy, and the opening up of
education and the media to allow people to develop themselves. I think
this is probably what Zeitgeist members would eventually like to see,
but the point is, to make it possible it’s necessary to struggle and win
what we can.

This isn’t to say that many of the technologies advocated by the
Venus Project/Zeitgeist couldn’t play a really important role in a
better society. But in focusing just on technological changes, they
ignore that technology is a part of society, not the root of it. If all
our problems could be solved with technology, then the ancient Egyptians
would have developed steam engines. They had all the knowledge
necessary to do so, but they didn’t because their society was based on
slavery, and as long as there were plenty of slaves and peasants to do
the work, who needed steam power? More to the point, their kind of
society wasn’t expanding economically in the same way capitalism does,
so there was no need for a technology capable of unleashing an
industrial revolution. So nobody ever followed through the theoretical
knowledge into practice. Steam engines were invented when human society
was ready to use them and needed them.

Similarly today, we won’t convert our energy supply to renewables or
start using environmentally friendly technology exclusively, because our
society is still based on economic growth and making money. For these
technologies to be part of the solution, they need to be accompanied by
socioeconomic changes to the way the world works, and to do that we
need to politically defeat the ruling class.

The politics that Zeitgeist does promote are essentially that you
boycott aspects of society they don’t like: don’t open an account with
the the three biggest banks in the US (but implying that an account with
another bank is in some way better?) and boycott energy companies by
taking your house off the grid, for example. What this ignores is that
for working-class people forced to work long hours for low pay, putting a
wind turbine in your garden just isn’t something they can afford in
time or money. Boyotts are individual actions, whereas socialists argue
for a collective response to social problems, where we struggle for the
power to make solutions like renewable energy available for everyone.

Power

Zeitgeist activists argue that they are just trying to “raise
awareness” of the technical solutions available to our problems. But the
fact is most people know on some instinctive level that things can be
better than the way they are. They have a better
understanding of power and the state than most Zeitgeist activists do.
They know that if you start trying to live outside the money system and
move past capitalism, then the capitalists will use their real power to
try and stop you. They have money, legal authority and armed force.
They’ve used all these things every time people have tried to move
beyond capitalism, from the Russian Revolution to the Bolivarian
revolution in Venezuela today. That doesn’t mean we should give up, but
it does mean we should be prepared for the very real fight we have on
our hands with the people in power. “Raising awareness” will not be
enough to win that fight.

Noam Chomsky has summed up the problems with Zeitgeist Addendum well when he says:

I don’t regard the Zeitgeist Movement as an activist movement.
Rather, it seems to me a very passive movement that is misled by
documents that have a very pleasant sound, but collapse on analysis.
Among them is the idea that we should "stop supporting the system" and "not fight it", that is, seek to change and overcome it. That means we
should withdraw into passivity. Nothing could be more welcome to those
in power. My feeling is that however sincere the leaders and
participants may be, the movement is seriously misguided. It is not
leading towards change, but is undermining it by encouraging passivity
and withdrawal from engagement, and offering a false sense that some
real alternative is being proposed, except in terms so vague and
divorced from reality as to be virtually meaningless.

Climate scepticism

Peter Joseph has expressed scepticism about the reality of climate
change, arguing that Zeitgeist should not base its arguments on
something that “might not be true”. If anything undermines its claim
to be based on scientific ideas it’s this. But it does fit in with the
relationship that Zeitgeist activists maintain with other conspiracy
groups maintain like We Are Change. To most folk the idea that the
entire scientific community is engaged in a gigantic fraud to lie about
the climate is madness, but it seems plausible if you already believe
that the US government carried out 9/11 and the world is run by “international
bankers”.

The opening section of the first film, about the use of earlier myths
by Christianity to create a fictional story of a historical Jesus as
fact, is not that important to the political implications of the
movement as a whole. But it does show up how the ideas of Zeitgeist are a
mixed up mishmash of stuff from all over the place, as it’s riddled
with inaccuracies about ancient religions, such as claiming the Egyptian
God Horus was a Sun God, born of a Virgin on December 25 (each one of these claims is just blatantly not true).

And if all of the above hasn’t concinved you that Zeitgeist is a load
of pish, then consider this. It has attracted the endorsement of
someone who has made himself a bit of a laughing stock by his
increasingly outlandish public claims, and who is a damaged product of
the British celebrity circuit. I’m talking of course about ... Robbie
Williams!